Sometimes kindness comes from the strangest places.
As mentioned in my previous posting, I flew back to Canada recently for a good friend’s wedding. As a result of some rather creative airline booking in order to chase the best fare, I found myself in LA for the better part of the day on the way back, arriving from Calgary just past midday with the next leg of my flight, LA to Brisbane, not due to depart until 1155PM. With an entire afternoon and evening to kill, I figured I’d see if I could find a car to rent for the day, and head out to see a few of the spots I remembered from a trip taken through California with my mother and my sisters in the early 1990s.
It being LA, and me being a bit of a droptop freak, I managed to find a place that would rent me a Mazda MX5 Miata – a car that some of you may know holds a pretty special place in my heart. I fell in love when I rented one for a long summer weekend in 1999, and ended up road-tripping most of the way across the Canadian province of Ontario to buy one when my beloved Honda CRX got stolen shortly thereafter. (This story, somehow, was covered in Reader’s Digest. See here.)
My mother made fun of that little car for a year, before finding herself behind the wheel of it on yet-another road trip, this time a two-car caravan from Toronto to Nova Scotia that we took together, her and her huband and I sharing driving duties between the MX5 and a Madza 323 I’d bought for $50 so that I could store my beloved green beauty during the harsh Atlantic Canadian winter. While the specifics are perhaps best left to imagination, it’s safe to say that, at least once during this trip, a police officer we encountered chose to err on the side of kindness with us.
By the time we arrived in Halifax, it was nigh-on impossible to pry either my mother or her husband from the convertible. Once unloading me at my house back at school, the two of them promptly ‘borrowed’ the car (in her version, I’m told, I offered) for an extended jaunt around the province of Nova Scotia. On returning the car to me a few days later, they announced their decision to buy one.
She has it to this day. When I’m lucky, she even lets me drive it.
All of which brings us back to LA.
I found a place with the car I wanted, a small-but-friendly independent shop that seemed to have maybe a dozen cars in inventory in total. I arranged for them to pick me up from the airport, and agreed that I’d leave the car at the after-hours drop-off point at 10PM or so, in time to catch a shuttle bus back to the airport and catch my midnight flight.
“Just remember,” said the guy I did the paperwork with as he handed me the keys and remote entry fob, “this is the only key we have. Make sure you hide it where we told you to when you return the car.”
I signed off on the paperwork (including, of course, a sizeable deposit loaded onto my credit card ‘just in case’), and headed out to a beautiful sunny afternoon drive up the coast.
Fast-forward to 11PM. Having returned the car in plenty of time and killed the better part of on hour working through some decidedly average airport burritos (as if there are other kinds), I decide it’s time to head through security and flop around the departure lounge. Having asked what kind of facilities were available on the gate side of security in the small terminal V Australia flies out of (“none past 10PM, really” was what I was told at check-in), I’d purposely held back from security until 10-15 minutes before boarding so I could eat/drink/have somewhere to sit.
So, doing what one does at security, I empty my pockets. Oh look, a car key.
Oh, crap. A car key.
By this point, I’m at the front of the queue, people behind me, and, this being America, about a half-dozen heavily-armed police and security guards watching for any indication that I might be planning to light my shoes on fire mid-flight.
I run through the options quickly in my head.
Too late to catch a cab or shuttle back to the car rental place to put the keys where I was supposed to. No easy place to leave them here in the airport, as the car rental desks are in another terminal, and the rental company I dealt with doesn’t have a desk here anyways. Starting to cause a hold-up, line forming behind me. Big deposit sitting on the credit card. I’ve got a flight to catch.
Crap.
In to the plastic bin they go, and I pass through security. Thankfully, without any additional delays. Once through, I run through my options again. Chewing on it a bit more, I approach two uniformed LAX police officers at the security desk, and explain my situation in my best “I am a stupid tourist” routine. (It’s for reasons like these that I like to travel in a Roots hoodie that says CANADA in big letters across the front of it.) I’m hoping they can steer me to an information or Travelers Aid desk, or assist me in getting the keys back out through security.
“Where’s the car from?” the taller of the two police officers drawls in a slow Californian accent.
I show them the name and address on the tag.
“Can you get these to an information desk on the outside of security so I can get them to pick them up, or something like that?” I ask.
“Nah, look, I got nothin’ to do,” the taller one offers. “I’ll run ‘em over for you if you like.” Turning to his partner, he asks, “is our car still parked out front?” His partner nods. “Right-o, give ‘em to me.”
I start to explain the unique place they’d asked me to put the keys so that they’d be able to find them, while not leaving the car – a convertible parked outside at night in LA – too obvious for a car thief. My new police officer friend quickly cuts me off.
“Don’t worry ‘bout that, I’ll just drop ‘em in the mail slot or something.”
It’s a kind offer, and my options are limited, so I hand over the keys, and thank the officer profusely for his assistance.
“Don’t mention it,” he says with a smile.
Settling into the departure lounge, I hope the keys make it to where they need to go so I’m not on the hook for the price of a new computer-chip key and remote lock fob. I send the rental company a quick email explaining what’s happened, hope for the best, and get on my flight.
On arrival in Brisbane, I check my inbox to find the following email:
"we did not get any key from anyone and we need to move the car and rent it today. If we do not get the key soon, we have to make a new one and will cost more $280.00 as its a transcendent key!
we do not keep spare keys. so this is a problem."
Not good. I don't even know what transcendent means in this context, but I'm imagining that somewhere, Jesus is royally pissed off. I send back a lame “surely there’s another key for it somewhere?”, but resign myself to the fact that, while I’m on the hook for $280 for my own inability to properly follow instructions, hey, at least the car wasn’t stolen overnight. And who knows, maybe the key will turn up. Can I ring a dealership in the US and find out what a replacement key and fob is worth, to see if I can talk them down?
Over the next few days, I settle back into work and try not to think about it.
Fast forward a week and a half, and I’m doing a quick scan through my inbox, when an email from the rental car company catches my eye, terse but to-the-point.
"thats ok. we got it. he gave to security grd."
I guess my friendly LAX police officer got it right after all. Mr police officer, wherever you are (probably at the airport), thank you for returning my key for me.
